Nikki Haley plays at home this Saturday, but she has everything to lose. Donald Trump's only rival still in the race for the Republican presidential nomination resembles one of those middle-of-the-pack teams about to play a game against their own team against the league's unbeatable leader. Unless a miracle happens, there is no way to win it. The meeting takes place as part of the primaries of South Carolina, the state where Haley was born and where she was governor between 2011 and 2017 before answering the call of (of all people) Trump to become US ambassador to the United States to take over nations.
The candidate has been traveling around the southern state all week, essentially repeating the same rally. One of her highlights is when she says, “There were 14 men in this race; I took 12 ahead, now I only have the last one left. There are 12 party rivals who have fallen by the wayside in recent months, including Florida Gov. and former Republican leader Ron DeSantis. But the last one is also the most difficult: polls show Trump leading her by almost 35 points in this Saturday's primaries.
If the forecasts come true, it would be the fourth early election campaign date after Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada that Trump accepts without much effort. But Haley, who has had February 24 marked red on her calendar for months as her big chance, warned earlier this Tuesday that regardless of the outcome, she had no plans to “go anywhere.” That he will continue to fight; First in Michigan and then on March 5, the famous Super Tuesday, the day when most primaries take place in states across the country.
For a handful of votes, Haley traveled 300 miles to two rallies a day on Wednesday and Thursday, doing her best in North Augusta, one of those American cities that allowed itself to be swallowed up by its own suburb, and in Myrtle Beach, a resort town in the Low season, as well as in the charming and prosperous ports of Beaufort and Georgetown. If these four places have anything in common, it's how little they resemble Bamberg, the middle-of-nowhere town where Haley was born 52 years ago. It is a working class community, decidedly democratic and with a black majority (63.7%). The first is a rarity in South Carolina, which has voted Republican in the last 11 presidential elections. Second, not so much: at 27.09%, it is the fifth state with the highest proportion of African American population in the Union. It's a segment that didn't support her when she ran for governor. This time, certain unfortunate statements made by the candidate, who refused to cite slavery as the cause of the Civil War on television, will not help her win.
Last Wednesday you couldn't find any Haley sympathizers in Bamberg, but at least one neighbor who remembered her. “I was friends with my daughter-in-law at school when she was in eighth grade. [14 años]. This is a small place, you know? We all know each other. “My daughter-in-law speaks of her fondly,” said Jeff Deibel, who runs the local radio station and took photos that day of the hole left in “a three-story building” by a tornado that devastated the town of about 3,000 residents in January.
Racism in childhood
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Last week, Haley's campaign bus (the “Beast of the Southeast,” as she calls it) stopped here and the candidate was able to see the damage in person. “This is the city that taught me to be strong,” he told his former neighbors. In her memoirs (two to date) she remembers her years in Bamberg less fondly and talks about the racism she felt when the girl Nimarata Randhawa had not yet changed her surname to that of her husband and her family was the only one of Indian origin was the place that was twice denied the sale of a house due to her ethnic origins. Or when she was eliminated from a beauty pageant because she was “neither black nor white.”
Deibel, like many of those who attend the candidate's rallies these days, doesn't have high hopes for her victory. “Our system favors polarization.” And the parties instead of the people, so I don’t see much of a future for it,” he says. And like those supporters, she thinks she'll be a good governor. That's what Deborah Brooks thinks, as she recalled before the Augusta rally her “extraordinary and compassionate role” in preventing the Charleston tragedy from becoming an insurrection. Brooks was referring to the 2015 massacre of nine African Americans in a church by young white supremacist Dylann Roof, which led to another milestone in Haley's biography: the day he ordered the Confederate flag to be taken down from the State House . . Another of her voters, Monty Steedley, who supported Trump in 2016 and 2020, argued that he saw her as the “only possible option.” He doesn't even want to hear from Joe Biden, a most likely Democratic candidate, and he thinks the former president is “too self-obsessed” and still gets “goosebumps” when he thinks about the attack on the Capitol. “What would have happened if he had had the army on his side?” he wondered.
Haley voters with signs reading “South Carolina Loves Nikki” in the coastal town of Beaufort on Wednesday. ALYSSA POINTER (Portal)
Both arguments, her seniority as governor and the calculation that she carries less baggage to defeat Biden, crop up again and again in Haley's speeches in which she defends that she lowered unemployment while in charge of South Carolina was, and that this attracted companies like Boeing or BMW. He blames Washington for all evil and promises to bring the Capitol into line. She also attacks her Saturday rival for his advanced age, for increasing the national debt during his term as president, for his sympathy for Vladimir Putin or for his attacks on veterans, an issue on which the candidate has avoided after months of avoiding it , has decided to enter personal space: She often talks about her husband being stationed in Afghanistan and recalls the time the tycoon said that Americans who die in war are “losers” and “assholes.”
At her rallies, Haley also shows some of her contradictions. For example, when she asserts that she would be the first woman in the White House, but turns away from the feminist rhetoric of the “glass ceiling” that Hillary Clinton almost broke, which was inappropriate for her conservative base. Or when the daughter of a professor who emigrated from India to Canada with eight dollars in his pocket advocates deportation as the only way out of the immigration crisis.
His supporters, like Bob Cook, who attended the Georgetown rally with his dog Wallen, dressed in an “I Pick Nikki” T-shirt, see this series of proposals as the living picture of reason – on it if you trust his campaign, it may win him the favor of undecideds and independents and a “return to the essence of the lifelong Republican Party.” Perhaps Cook didn't realize that this formation no longer exists.
David Sandifer, supporter and “double” of Donald Trump, this Thursday at the doors of a Nikki Haley rally in Myrtle Beach (South Carolina).iker seisdedos
Or perhaps it's being hijacked by the enthusiasm of those spontaneous people who show up at every stop on Haley's campaign bus with signs of their support for the former president. These days Myrtle Beach was at its busiest and loudest. At the front was a guy named David Sandifer who likes to dress up as a tycoon “to show his support.” In addition to the blue suit, red tie and yellow wig, he appeared with the rest of the official accoutrements of Trumpism: the hoax that the 2020 election was stolen from him, the complaint that the trials against him (91 felonies in four different cases) are politically motivated, the warning that it could spark an “insurrection” if he ends up in prison, and the theory that if Haley persists, it is because some dark forces are funding his campaign to divide and pave the way for Republicans for Biden's re-election.
Beyond the conspiracies, Georgetown historian Michael Kazin believes Haley's efforts could be due to two reasons: “the vain hope that one of Trump's legal problems will turn his party's voters against him” or that she is doing it on purpose , positioning herself as a candidate in 2028. Others, like her Clemson University classmate Carie Mager, attribute this to her “very, very opinionated” personality.
Or, who knows, maybe it's because when she walks determinedly onto the stage at one of her rallies, she repeats the South Carolina slogan, a phrase she sings next to the palm tree, the official state tree, and the license plates of her cars decorates: “As long as I breathe, there is still hope.”
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